Maybe if more hunks and hotties showed up?

Dan, you have noticed that this ‘mandate’ seems, when push has come to shove in DC over the last nine months, to have diminished considerably?

What could account for this other than constituents who may’ve voted against the GOP for any number of reasons (Foley, for some), but do not want their reps following the new Congressional leadership on the war. So much for 2006 having been a referendum on the war, by your own test, that is, the vote.

Nobody likes the war. But when constituents have had to finally face up to what will likely happen in the world if USA gets chased out of the mideast, the message they’re sending their reps is clearly, obviously, not what you’re implying it is.

Otherwise the legislators would certainly, surely, without doubt, have been reflecting it over these past nine months. Right?

The key difference is that there was a draft then, there isn’t now. If the draft existed today, the level of anti-war apathy would drop out of sight, and the streets would be full of protesters.

I’m not sure I understand the argument. I think the questions are simple enough and asked by enough polling outfits to provide at least some reasonable idea of people’s opinions. Especially when there are more specific polls asking when troops should withdrawal or if more troops should be added — Bush’s policies still fare terribly in those as well.

Furthermore we don’t have to exactly guess if the polls reflect people’s real behavior. We have the 2006 election for that and they were a pretty decisive confirmation that voters were exactly as upset with the GOP as the polls indicated. Perhaps even moreso – almost no one thought the Senate was seriously in play.

“Do you approve of the way Bush is running the war in Iraq”. If I say no, it is assumed that I am anti the Iraq war. Maybe I disapprove because I think that we didn’t press hard enough in the beginning and that we need to have many more troops on the ground and that we need to aggressively pound the insurgents to pulp.

“Do you approve of Bush’s performance in Office”. If I say no, then it is assumed that I don’t like Bush and want him out of office and favor the Democrats. Maybe I don’t approve because he hasn’t vetoed any spending bills, disliked the stance he is taking on illegal immigration, distrust open borders policy and NAFTA support.

Citing polls as the evidence that people are against the Iraq War, or anything else is deceptive since the questions the polls ask are meaningless and the results subject to being distorted to be anything they want it to be.

But there’s another element — the protest is no longer in the street. The liberal blogosphere — the Daily Kos, MyDD, etc — formed in large part as a reaction to the impotence of protest culture today. In-person protests I’ve been too have been frustrating affairs organized by, or hijacked by, the looniest elements of the left. But those guys barely represent a fraction of the tens of millions of anti-war Americans you see turn up in polls that constitute a clear majority. That’s why sites like Kos founded — they take out the Mumia/anti-Israel/communist factor and instead focus on ways to energize a broad community and fight for consensus positions rather than everyone’s fanatical pet cause. That’s the source of their huge popularity.

So by the standards of foot protests, yeah the antiwar movement is pathetic. But if you count the meteoric rise of internet activity, Kos alone has a larger daily readership than many major newspapers and they’ve had great success in actually influencing and fundraising for Democratic politicians. The antiwar movement isn’t dead, it just went virtual.

While it does make the protest look stupid… I’m not sure thats how we want the next generation of Americans to feel about the country.